Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Google vows to delete Chrome's unique client ID

Abandon/abort rate

Presumably the main thing they're looking for is the number of downloads that are never installed, as people are likely to ignore a failed install and go back to IE without reporting anything.

Sky to pack pubs with 3D TVs

Passive glasses, dude...

The polarising glasses this tech uses are worth about 20 pence each, not 100 squid...

Dedicated Vi device vies for buyers

Hang on, the loonies!

Surely the real goal here is campfire deathmatch? Network network network! I want to deathmatch!

No networking?!?

Really, this is what I wanted before the eeePC came out, but I wanted it with some kind of network connection. Now I've got an MP3 player with 2" screen, 7" eeePC and 6" Elonex/Hanvon eReader with QWERTY keyboard. If there was a network port, they might just have a sale, but there isn't, so I'll wait for the Openinkpot project to get my Elonex supported (and work out how to use the USB host socket on the top) and I'll use that for my command line needs.

Command line + ePaper = L337.

Sony Bloggie

Why do ElReg camcorder reviews...

Why do the Register's camcorder reviews never discuss compression ratios and the potential for editing and processing?

Telling us it's MP4 is all well and good, but how heavily compressed does it go? Will the video degrade into a hellish series of blocks if we run it through Final Cut and reencode it to any form of MPEG? HD's all well and good, but right now I don't know if any given HD device is going to give me better results than an old SD tape camcorder in terms of final picture quality.

I look at the "pocket" HD camcorders and the handheld HD camcorders and despite the big price difference, they seem to have very similar recording times -- are they using the same compression ratios? Are they *good* compression ratios? I don't want to shell out £500 to get superior optics only to find that the software cheats me out of picture quality so that I'd be as well off with a £100 pocket model.

Enquiring minds need to know!

Lib Dem candidate admits to unnatural vice

In another shocking revelation...

I can exclusively reveal that Winston Churchill was a member of the Liberal Party before joining the Conservatives.

Won't somebody think of the children!

'Twitter gives voice to the voiceless' - eg the US President

In other words...

" In case you have not read a newspaper, listened to the radio or looked at the interwebs for a few years, Twitter is the latest stage in the progression of web formats. It is essentially a type of personal website so easy to update that users are often tempted to do so even when they don't really need to. "

Or in other words, it's like TheRegister, but for people who aren't tech journalists....

What's the Paris Hilton angle?

Giant flying pliers menace West Bromwich

Isn't that...

Isn't this just a publicity shot from the next Doctor Who Christmas Special?!?

'Health and safety killjoys' kill cheese-rolling race

H&S

Health and safety has two problems here:

1) Inherent danger involved in the activity.

Not a biggie. Some people climb hundreds of metres up without safety equipment. Their life, their choice.

2) Overcrowding.

When the event draws too many people, individual risk gives way to collective risk. This event has got so big that one person's slip could hurt a lot of people. This event was originally a small local gathering, and would have happened in many places around the area. It did not evolve for the scale presented now. Marathons have large numbers of participants. Sprints do not. Nature of the game.

If people want to take part in cheese rolling, they should organise their own local event.

Lots of small ones is safer than one big one.

Zero* welcome for 200 Welsh TV shows - in Wales

Myth...?

So what you're saying is "I am Welsh, I don't speak Welsh, therefore Welsh people don't speak Welsh?" I think you'll find that some actually do. No-one in the UK believes all Welsh people speak Welsh.

And as for less languages...

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Agreed.

"The welsh language is a luxury that the country ... can ill afford in these straitened financial times"

I would like to extend this argument to English. The grammatical irregularities, lunatic spelling system and strangulated pronunciation make it a massively inefficient medium of communication, and a luxury we can ill afford. Switching to Esperanto would allow us to get our kids out of school and into the workhouse by the age of 12.

In these straitened financial times, these are the sorts of measures we must take....

Re: Agreed

The BARB FAQ says that the panel is 5,100 homes, so if they've been selected in a statistically sound manner, we're looking at 51 households.

However, I can't find the "20 cell matrix" that BARB use to check demographics on their website, so there's not even any guarantee that they have properly accounted for Welsh speakers in the survey.

I've frequently heard the criticism that both BARB and RAJAR are devalued by the requirement to be owner occupier in order to participate in the survey, which means the results are biased to middle class viewing habits, and in the case of rural Wales this often means "white settler".

The only way for anyone to fully understand these figures is with confirmation that Welsh language is proportionally represented, and with a plot of viewing figures for all Welsh-language programmes (which will reveal the bias in the sample set -- I'm guessing that we could determine pretty quickly where only one household has a child in a particular age range, for example).

Mutated genetic supertrout developed in lab

My God! What have we done?

Some supervillian will now apply this to the Great White, and man will finally be confined to land.

Oh, the humanity!

Microsoft whitewashes MSN in latest Web2.0rhea whimsy

Oooh... now that's clever....

"According to The Guardian, Microsoft plans this year to make programmes and films available in high definition based on its Silverlight tech. But Redmond clearly isn't brave enough to apply its own proprietary software to the rest of its MSN video estate yet."

So the plan is to use well established technology so that people can use the site immediately, so aren't scared off. Then use enhanced content as an incentive to install the otherwise-unnecessary Silverlight player.

Increased complexity in the server farm, but it will drive uptake.

Cisco 'forever changes internet' with... a router

Yes, exactly: teleconferencing.

When there's two people in a call, lack of video is no problem. When there's half-a-dozen people in a call, not being able to see each other really gets in the way of conversation. Yet perversely, Skype only lets you video conference in one-to-one calls, because of bandwidth constraints.

I'm studying with the OU, and the online tutorials really are badly hampered by the lack of visual cues (such as "confused face" and "general eagerness to say something"). I also do day work in a virtual team and there's similar problems, coupled with the risk of seeming aggressive when asking something due to lack of facial expressions.

Video will be big once the pipes big enough to cope with multiple streams simultaneously.

Google goes cycling

Re ::shakes head::

Well you know what? I started cycling last year and I bought a map produced by a local cycle advocacy group and it has been invaluable -- it highlights all the hidden back-street cut-throughs that aren't signposted (cos they're not suitable for cars), it highlights all the cycle lanes and dedicated cycle paths that you might miss if you were cycling up a parallel street instead.

It even makes it clear when a footpath isn't open to bikes (information sadly missing from most maps)... or it did before the council changed a lot of routes.

Microsoft rejiggers EU browser ballot after complaints

For the last time...

The reason that this is a problem is that Internet Explorer has a very poor record on standards compliance.

The dominance of Windows leads to a dominance of IE, precisely because of the "don't care" crowd.

The dominance of IE (not standards compliant) leads to coding of sites for IE, leading to lock-out of other browsers.

If IE was free for all platforms, this would not be a problem.

However, IE is not available for PS3, Wii, Symbian, Linux, etc etc etc, and this means that IE dominance perpetuates the tying of the internet to Windows PCs.

Mobile technology has made great leaps in recent years, and home TVs are now of a sufficient resolution to cope with a rich browsing experience. Ubiquitous internet is finally becoming a reality, but it is not to Microsoft's commercial benefit to allow this to happen -- WinCE failed to make a solid dent in the set-top-box market, and DTV and Blu-ray technology have introduced an MS-free software stack into the living room. Windows Mobile can ape much of the non-compliant functionality of full fat Windows, so why encourage people to use iPhones, Android phones and the like?

The ballot screen is a clumsy hack, but it is necessary to allow the internet to break free from the desktop and realise its full potential.

Crap Scottish weather favours ginger hair

Citation...

Have you seen the Ploenulus yourself? The text you quote is quite different from the version on Google Books:

" Byth ilymmoth ynnocho thuulech antidamaschon

Ys sidobrim thyfel yth chyl ischon them liful "

What is the provenance of the version you quote, and are you aware how the purported meaning of the Phoenician fits into the context of the surrounding Latin?

Or are you merely parroting a largely discredited 18th century fetish that many nations had for the idea of being "the lost tribe of Israel"?

Ginger genes, but...

If you actually read the article you've just cited, you'll see that while there was *a* ginger gene in Europe back then, this was not *the* ginger gene -- it was a different gene.

Of course, if red hair evolved twice in Europe and fair hair once, that suggests that light pigmentation is more than merely "acceptable", but of a real evolutionary advantage -- and that would most likely be vitamin D production, as others have said.

Stone them, really?

That must mean that gingers are extinct, because ginger is originally a viking trait....

Pixel Qi sunlight-readable colour e-paper inbound

Terminological confusion

I appreciate that a transflective screen is effectively a single sheet, hence the e-paper tag, but when you talk about e-paper, most people think of persistent e-ink. I certainly did, right up until you started talking about LCDs.

It sounds like a great technology (and I'm hoping they'll release a kit for the original eeePC as I'd love to eke a few more hours out of my battery), but I don't think the term e-paper helps to clarify things for the reader, and incorrect user expectations could lead the tech to a premature grave....

Ubisoft undone by anti-DRM DDoS storm

Re: Oh dear

" WRT DRM - why is having a permanent net connection such a trauma now, with always on ADSL? "

You're not a mobile worker, are you? Some of us find that the odd game installed on the company laptop is a good way to while away a couple of hours in a soulless hotel on the edge of a business park. Two days of always-on hotel internet is the same as a month of always-on home internet.

BBC protects 'unique' 1Xtra listeners from radio cull

RAJAR stats

How can you discuss RAJAR stats for yoof channels when RAJAR only surveys homeowners, who are most well past 25....?

E-book buyers favour iPad over Kindle and co.

To paraphrase:

How do you like your eggs?

The way I don't like them.

Most people genuinely don't know what they want. The real proof will be one year after the launch of the iPad when someone does a study of the number of books read by an average iPad users (or at least iPad user who bought it planning to use it as an ereader anyway) vs average Kindle/Reader user.

User experience will encourage reading on dedicated ebook readers and discourage it on iPad.

You mark my words (most ebook readers allow annotations, after all)....

SeaWorld killer killer whale must die, Bible insists

Kill! Kill! Kill!

After killing two humans, there's no way SeaWorld can claim keeping it is safe.

They have to kill it now, as it's not like there's any vast body of salt water they can release it in to where it will be far away from human beings....

Street View threatens to throw Eurostrop

Story of Web 2.0's life:

Company wants to get into a market.

Company codes a solution.

Regulators state it isn't safe and/or doesn't protect data.

Company says it can't afford to make it safe and/or protect data.

It baffles me how companies have got a way with pleading "technology". YouTube is a publisher -- it's a branded site with lots of branded content, but they cry "ISP" when asked to take responsibility for that content.

Chatrooms put people in touch with each other but without any sort of supervision or vettin as would occur in the real world (eg IDing drinkers in pubs). They cry "technology" and they're let off with running a profit without protecting their customers.

Stuff it, guys, off-line computer programmers deal with regulatory constraints all the time. If we write software that doesn't comply with them -- we get fined.

On-line companies ignore regulation, steamroller through, and when someone pops up and points out the flaws they say "it's too expensive to fix". That's a flawed business model, and that's the business's fault.

No sympathy from me.

iPhone ego clash costs Flash at Virgin America

Format conversion...?

"- Transparent PNGs are encoded in JPG with an alpha channel to further optimise size."

This is not good practice, as transcoding from one lossy compressed format to another degrades quality.

This is a mere hack that encourages bad planning and sloppy design.

Typing merely by thinking - plugless brainjack kit invented

You haven't understood

This technology reads your brain as you carry out the thoughts that trigger the finger movements. It doesn't mean that you don't have to move your fingers, but it does mean that you can still type if your fingers aren't there.

But if your fingers/wrists/arms are very sore rather than missing, these thoughts will still trigger the movements and exacerbate the pain.

(Former sufferer of a (thankfully) mild RSI, still requiring careful management of keying time and posture.)

AAAAAAAAARGH! Bad science reporting!

"One day, a relatively simple headset may allow a person to manipulate a cursor and enter text without benefit of such antique interfaces as mouse, keyboard, voice-control or touchscreen - so freeing up his or her hands for critical tasks such as drinking coffee or scratching."

The point is that they are reading instructions to muscles. To drink coffee you have to think about moving your hands appropriately. If you're thinking about drinking coffee, you won't be able to think about typing simultaneously without spilling it!

Android app brings in $13K a month

Good point.

Most mobile apps are mere mashups of functions in the OS anyway -- it's more configuration than coding.

That was really the original goal of open source software, wasn't it? To remove the need to "reinvent the wheel" in code and just plug all the modules together to achieve the necessary

Back in the early Unix days, this resulted in the various C libraries that we now all take for granted (even if in their ported forms as used by other languages) and all the standard shell utilities that could be scripted together with pipes and redirection.

Modern FOSS has lost its way a bit, producing a lot of monolithic code that has to be heavily refactored to extract individual functions.

Case in point: OpenOffice.org. The GUI, rendering engine and backend are all tied together. Why's this bad? Cos every time they upgrade, the translation projects have to start again or you're stuck on the last version. Why shouldn't you be able to render and edit 3.0 with a 2.0 interface? Sure, you'll not get all the new functionality, but at least you'll be able to both use your own language and read files created in the latest version....

Men at Work appeal Down Under plagiarism ruling

Not just the tune...

Even the lyrics bear a striking resemblance to the Welsh song (although there's no telephone wires or tails on fire in the Welsh blackbird's case).

British Library wants taxpayer to gobble the web

But...

The current law on books is that every book or periodical that gets published commercially in the UK must be supplied to 5 libraries that hold copies in perpetuity. There is no judgement on suitability. If it's published, it's in. They are just trying to maintain the status quo, and I think that's a good thing. I have seen many websites vanish with only a partial mirror at archive.org . Among the legions of dross at Geocities, there were several gems, including one of the two best internet libraries of Scottish Gaelic song lyrics that were lost.

Then there's the idea of corpus research. Having access to all these tweets and comments would allow language researchers to examine questions like how the internet is changing literacy, and that is a genuinely interesting and important topic.

Montblanc's Gandhi pen run out

Uh-huh...

"£16k says the Beeb, £14,400 according to reports last year."

I think -- and I may be wrong here -- that the rupee is stronger than last year...?

What's on the mind of the Freetard eBookworm?

The full story.

Immature sexually frustrated nerd reads teenage trash -- number 7.

Wants woman: needs photo for lonely hearts site -- number 9.

Photo not having desired effect: needs to "enhace" his package -- number 2.

Woman bites -- now needs to talk his way round the obvious doctoring -- number 8.

Failed attempts using info from number 1.

Falls back to number 3 for simpler explanation.

As stated, this leads to a domestic situation requiring number 10

Woman goes on line looking for number 4.

In the process she discovers number 6 on the hard drive.

Woman calls power company and broadband provider demanding immediate disconnection.

Man uses remaining battery in laptop and neighbour's unsecured wifi to download number ´5 and restore his access to number 6 and its ilk...

MPs bash broadband tax

Dictatorship of the majority...?

"We believe that a 50 pence levy placed on fixed telecommunication lines is an ill-directed charge. It will place a disproportionate cost on a majority who will not, or are unable to, reap the benefits of that charge,"

Isn't this pretty much the definition of all government spending? The majority of people pay National Insurance to subsidise the minority who have serious illnesses or long-term unemployment problems. A city dweller who never travels more than 5 miles in his car pays the same road tax as a farmer who lives 50 miles from any major town. An immigrant not educated in this country and with no children is still required to fund UK schools.

It is in the country's interests to maintain a stable rural population, and right now "market forces" are freezing rural people out of broadband, and they are the people most in need of improved communications links.

No amount of tax breaks is going to make rural cabling more profitable than sticking to dense urban centres -- compulsion is the only option.

Apple strips top shelf, leaves corporate smut in place

Hate to say it, but...

I actually see Apple's point on this.

Big names like Playboy do have a bit less of a sleaze factor simply by virtue of being a known brand.

That's brand politics for you.

iPad pitch to the Wall Street Journal laid bare

Most users...?

"I've lost count of the number of times I've seen people forget to manually eject their USB pendrives from a computer before pulling it out of the port."

Most users don't "forget" to do it -- they didn't know in the first place!

So design error one is making it possible.

Design error two is that the OS doesn't pop up a great big flashing error every single time you do it, but gives you a small non-descript dialogue box or balloon, and includes a little checkbox saying "don't show this error again".

Unplugging a device without stopping it first risks data loss, so the user shouldn't be able to ignore it....

'Optionally manned' spy plane to fly this summer

British Weather vs Big Brother

Pah... Johnny Our-Government won't spy on us that easily -- we have our bally clouds to bally well protect us! Tally ho!!!

Airport scanners face double exposure

Not racist...

No, of course you're not racist... you're just a geriophilic sex-pest.

Chips make you chipper: Official

Accuracy....

Aside from the fact that they don't mention the control group (as others have commented), there is the problem of what "chips" means. Having never heard of this "Aston" place, I thought the prof was saying "crisps" in a funny accent.....

UK universities being broken by border control measures

Quite right too!

Foreign students!! They all want to blow us up!! When I was at uni I had a classmate from the Middle East, and she killed me with a suicide bomb in a lecture!! One of my classmates had a flatmate from the Middle East -- he killed me with a suicide bomb in the pub!! I was also killed on three separate occasions by foreign students I didn't know entering nightclubs with improvised incendiary devices, and twice in the Scotmid Coop by foreigners bearing bandoliers of hand grenades.

Edinburgh used to be a peaceful city, but since the University started letting in foreign students, you can't walk the streets for fear of being blown up unexpectedly by an angry student suicide squad!!

Foreign objects in orifices a bigger killer than laptops

Er... what?

"A terrifying thirty were despatched by a "Foreign body entering through skin or natural orifice".

And 360 were taken care of by "legal intervention involving firearm discharge"."

Surely getting shot is having a "foreign body [bullet] entering through skin"?

Street View catches Finn with his pants down

Height of the average Finn?

Oliver 8,

I think you're failing to consider the presence of the fence in the photo, and the height at which the camera is mounted on the Googlecar.

This bloke was on his own property and not visible to passers-by.

He should be OK.

US judges leave definition of obscenity to Amish, Kansas

What?

How can you be committing a federal crime based on community values? Surely that's a state issue, not a federal one? That's utterly, utterly preposterous!

Drayson locks Forces chiefs out of Defence budget carve-up

Privatising the military...

You think the military privatisation process hasn't started? With search and rescue going to tender, the RAF will for the first time take orders from a commercial organisation.

It's too late -- it's already here.

USB hack connects Droid to printers, video cams, and more

You're the counter-in-tuat

"For starters, hardwiring a mobile device to peripherals is counter-intuative!"

Even accounting for the spelling mistake, that makes no sense. First up, they aren't hardwiring anything. If you follow the link, what you get is a picture of an *external interface* that allows you to plug in devices. They may not be hot-swappable, but they're certainly cold-swappable. That's a bit different from "hardwired".

And what's "counterintuitive" about wanting to plug your digital cameraphone straight into a printer? Think about all the money the various camera/printer companies ploughed into Easyshare, DirectPrint, PictBridge and the like -- people want direct-from-camera printing, and I'm personally a bit surprised Google didn't see fit to support and sell that as feature out of the box.

It would also fit with making the Android a business phone -- carry your docs with you and print on demand (but only with the sysadmin's permission in the form of a central security policy, naturally).

Arab conned into marrying bearded lady

He didn't see her photo...

...his mum did! It says it in the article, in black and white (unless you've been playing silly beggars with custom style sheets in your browser again).

It's men that shouldn't see a woman's face, and his mum is quite likely not to be a man, so it's no problem at all for her to see the potential daughter-in-law's face. Really she should have insisted on meeting her in person, so maybe he should be suing his mother for neglect of parental duty too....

If you're going to be derisory about other people's cultures, get your facts straight first!

MTV Mexico pulls South Park episode

Meh...

The episode's main plot device is culturally specific anyway. It loses something when you spend the first half of the cartoon trying to work out what the heck they're on about!

Street View spymobile snowmobile prowls Winter Olympics

That last picture...

What do you mean "camera cover" -- that's a screenshot from a new hi-definition version of Descent, isn't it?

El Reg reader assembles own iPad

There's an app for that...

Here, does the iPad support printers via USB breakout? I see a novelty freebie app coming on....